Rebecca F. Kuang is a multi-award winning Best Selling Author and an accomplished scholar and academic. Her epic fantasy trilogy, The Poppy War, is a beautiful, brutal, story that combines the history of 20th-century China with a universe of monsters, magic, and gods. It is a heartbreaking and powerful piece of art, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in things like Game of Thrones and other fantasy works.
Her latest book, Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution, is a number one New York Times best seller. I think it's safe to say the book is a masterpiece. It explores an alternative history of academia centered at Oxford University in a magical version of London where literary translation is magical.
The book's central character, Robin Swift, is orphaned by cholera in Canton and is brought from China to London by a mysterious professor. We come to discover the truth of the Royal Institution of Translation alongside Robin, and in the process, we are given an unflinching look at the oppressive, colonial, racist ideology that allowed this institution to come into being.
What the best science fiction and fantasy do so well is make us look long and hard at our own world. Babel does so without sacrificing the story, which is filled with moments of sweetness and love and tenderness, and also moments of violence and loss and brutality.
In our conversation, Rebecca and I explore what it is to translate, what it is to speak, what it is to have an identity and a sense of place or home, and what it is to lose that. Rebecca, ever the scholar and storyteller, leads us into that territory in a beautiful way.
Show Notes:
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Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R.F. Kuang
The Poppy War Trilogy by R.F. Kuang
Ebony and Ivory: Race Slavery and the Troubled History of America's Universities by Craig Steven Wilder
The Phaedo by Plato
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#112 Translating Magic (with R. F. Kuang)